Category Archives: Soapbox

Lost at sea

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leaving usa

Loading our shipping container to leave USA

Our inability to find flight MH370 was still very prominent in the national media when I was in China last month.  The search for the aircraft and the false alarms caused by floating rubbish at sea has raised awareness about the amount of junk floating around our oceans, for instance 10,000 shipping containers are lost at sea every year,  or more than 1 every hour.  However, there are about 17 million containers in the world, so we only lose about 0.05% per annum which is a negligible amount unless its the one containing all your household goods as you move continents!

I was interested to find a high level of environmental awareness in China.  Alongside the reports on the search for flight MH370 the China Daily had a centre-page spread on Thursday 24th April, 2014 about ‘How pollution affects marine life’ with a focus on the garbage patches in the Pacific and North Atlantic oceans.  The North Atlantic Garbage Patch is more than 100 kilometres in diameter with about 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometre trapped in the gyre. These are big numbers and if you break it down to small areas then it is one piece of debris per five square metres, which a box 2.24 x 2.24m or 7 x 7 ft.  This doesn’t sound so bad until you consider the impact on wildlife, for instance 86% of all sea turtles are affected by entanglement or ingestion of marine debris and an autopsy on a sperm whale found dead in Spanish waters concluded that the cause of death was ingestion of 24 meters of plastic.  About 300 million tonnes of plastic are produced globally per year of which it is estimated about 6 million tonnes (2%) ends up in the oceans, with 80% being washed into the sea from rivers or blown by the wind from rubbish dumps.

The second law of thermodynamics [see my post on June 5th, 2013 on Impossible Perfection] limits the efficiency of all processes with the result that engineers are used to not worrying about losses of 10% or less so that the losses to the ocean of 0.05% and 2% mentioned above would be considered negligible but the enormous scale of human processes mean that the losses are having a significant impact on the fauna of the planet.  Engineers need to lead society towards a more harmonious and protective relationship with the rest of the planet.

Source: http://www.billiebox.co.uk/facts-about-shipping-containers/

What is Engineering?

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Engineering turnover in the UK was £1.1 trillion (for the year ending March 2012) which was 24.5% of UK turnover.  So clearly engineering is big and important to the economy of industrialised countries.  But what it is?  That’s a harder question to answer!  In 2013 almost two-thirds of the public could cite the engineering development of the last 50 years that has had the greatest impact on them – that compares with slightly more than one-third in 2010 so more people are beginning to recognise engineering when they see it.  Can you cite the engineering development that has had the greatest impact on you?  If so, post a comment (use the ‘Leave a reply’ box at the bottom of the page).

What is Engineering? As well as being the title of this post it is also a website that attempts to answer the question. You will find the classical answers there and elsewhere, i.e. that engineering is about taking the resources able in nature and converting them into products (e.g. buildings, computers, medical devices and planes) and services (e.g. water, electricity and communications) for society.  Engineers are problem-solvers who communicate and organise the implementation of solution which might be how to create a zero emission car or a carbon-neutral public building.  The best engineers look for elegant solutions so I rather like the no.2 definition that you get when you Google the question, i.e. ‘the action of working artfully to bring something about’.

Source: www.engineeringUK.com

Gadget stress

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2d543f31-6f09-43ba-875c-c2d5d3bd0cebWe went to the last night of ‘Twelfth Night’ on Saturday at the new, or rather completely rebuilt, Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. It was tremendous entertainment with songs and dance, Shakespearean comedy with a Scouse accent and an exciting start with Viola and the captain of the wrecked ship surging, dripping wet, onto the stage from what looked like a broken mirror lying on the floor but turned out to be a pool of water. Especially exciting for those sitting in the front row, since the Everyman is a theatre in the round and the front row probably got wet! They certainly had stage hands mopping up around their feet at the end of the scene.

I was amazed at the interval to see people on their smart phones and tablets. Maybe they were communicating their excitement about the production on social media but perhaps more likely they were desperate to find out what had been going on in the world and who had sent them messages. For me, time ‘off the grid’, disconnected from the electronic world is precious and to be protected but many people find it hard to disconnect and appear addicted. Our gadgets pander to our tendencies to be workaholics and to socialize.

Dr R. Thara, Director of the Schizophrenia Research Foundation in an interview reported in a piece by T.M. Luhrmann entitled ‘A great depression?’ in the NYT on March 25th, 2014 said “Gadgets. All these gadgets. Nobody thinks for themselves anymore.” We are certainly at risk of having no time to think for ourselves but the risk from our gadgets is more insidious because access to everyone else’s life via social media and professional networks can end up making our own life look dull and potentially depressing. Of course, most of us conspire in creating this false image by only telling the world about the good things that are happening in our lives.

It is better to pick up a good novel if we want to relax and find out more about ourselves. see my post entitled ‘Reading Offline’ on March 19th, 2014.

Reading offline

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138-3816_IMGDavid Mikics, writing in the New York Times, reports recent research suggests that reading books is an important aspect of coming to know who we are.  It is a private experience that is best done without distractions, i.e. all of your attention capacity is employed on the book [see my post entitled ‘Silence is golden‘ on January 14th, 2014 for more on attention capacity].  Our brains can achieve a much deeper level of thought and engagement when they are focussed on a single task without distractions.  This just does not happen when reading on-line because there are too many distractions.  Some research has shown that office-workers are distracted every three minutes and that it takes about 20 minutes to achieve a high level of engagement in a task.  So it is easy to see the attraction for bosses of replacing white-collar workers by smart machines [see my post entitled ‘Smart Machines‘ on February 26th, 2014].

But David Mikics suggests that reading a novel is important for deeper reasons associated with learning lessons about humanity that are not available elsewhere.  Novels take us on a journey with another self and allow us to look into people’s inner lives.  None of this can be achieved reading short blogs or watching short videos on-line and is perhaps why reading a good novel on holiday is such a cathartic and popular activity.

But don’t stop reading my blog instead click the ‘follow’ button if you have not already and then you can be distracted every Wednesday!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/opinion/sunday/a-focus-on-distraction.html